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Thursday, October 30, 2014

“La pastorale” by Henri Matisse: Stolen on May 20, 2010

Henri Matisse. La pastorale. Stolen, 2010. by Travis Simpkins

“La
pastorale” by Henri Matisse: Stolen on May 20, 2010

by Travis Simpkins

The Painting:

Bold
use of high-keyed color and undisguised brushwork take precedence
over any representational fidelities, making Henri Matisse's La
pastorale
a prime example of Fauvism. With vibrant colors, applied directly
from the tube, Matisse depicts nude figures reclining in the
foreground of a pulsing landscape. The picture was painted in 1905,
at the height of the short-lived artistic movement, which ran between
1904 and 1908. The loose group of Les
Fauves
or “the wild beasts” had three exhibitions together, displaying
their resolute visual departure from traditional practices.

The Theft:

On May 20, 2010, a lone thief pulled
off one of the biggest art thefts in history. Five works, valued at
upwards of €100m,
were stolen from the Musée
d'Art Moderne in Paris. The filched paintings were well-known works
by top-tier artists: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, Leger and Braque.

Lax
security and careless blunders were largely to blame for the success
of the heist. It was discovered that the paintings were gone around
7:00 a.m. The three guards on duty that night were dumbfounded,
telling investigators that they “saw nothing.” A closer look at
the museum's security system and the events of that shift painted an
unsettling picture. Inspection of the security alarms revealed that
the motion detectors that covered the area in which the theft took
place had been non-functional for nearly two months, since March 30.
The alarms points were malfunctioning, causing false alarms, and the
management decided to disable them to alleviate their frustration.
Spare parts to make repairs had been ordered, but had not arrived
yet.

On
the night of May 20, all of the exterior CCTV cameras were focused
towards the roof of the building, leaving the guards blind to street
level activity. At about 4:00 a.m., the thief sheared a padlock and
smashed through a first floor window to gain entry to the Musée
d'Art Moderne. Once inside, the masked “burly” thief passed by an
array of interior CCTV cameras, which nicely recorded his nonchalant
movements as he perpetrated the crime. The thief spent about 15
minutes removing the five canvases from their frames, and he placed
them all together in a large single bundle before exiting from the
same window. French investigators theorize that the guards were
sleeping, or otherwise distracted, in order to have missed the entire
crime playing out on their monitors. The
Brigade de Répression du Banditisme believes that the thief acted
alone.

In
2011, a suspect told police that he had thrown the five paintings in
the garbage and that they were destroyed by a trash compactor.
However, this claim is unsubstantiated.